“This must be the investigation Nate told me about,” I say. “He was looking into something called the SIA, or maybe the AIR? It’s hard to tell which one, but it sounds like they were going to offer you a job. Who do you think they are?”
James shrugs. “A subset of the CIA, maybe? Richter could be overseeing them as part of his job at the DNI. My uncle once told me the Agency has several covert arms that do the kinds of things even the CIA can’t be seen to be doing.”
I shiver. “Creepy.”
“But those pages from my notebook,” he says. “That’s what really concerns me. I don’t know why Nate went looking for those.”
“What are they?” Finn asks. He reaches for the stack of papers, and I reluctantly pass them back.
“It’s some of the latest work I’ve been doing for Dr. Feinberg.” James veers a little too sharply into the next lane, and I brace myself against the armrest. “I made a big breakthrough recently, but I didn’t tell Nate about it. He doesn’t like my research, thinks it isn’t healthy for me to be so focused on the past.”
“Where do you think he got them from?” Finn asks.
“Don’t know. Maybe Dr. Feinberg, or maybe he went through my things.”
I catch a flash of James’s thin, straight handwriting as Finn flips through the pages. I have a sudden realization that makes my heart sink, even though it shouldn’t matter after everything that’s happened.
“Is that breakthrough what you were going to tell me about?” I say. “The night you came home?”
James nods but doesn’t look away from the road. “Yeah.”
“What is it?” Finn asks.
“It’s something I’ve been working on for a long time. I’m finally starting to make some real progress, and those pages there are the crux of my formulations.”
“What are they for?”
“Travel in the fourth dimension.”
“Huh?”
James’s gaze flicks into the rearview mirror and back again. “Time travel.”
I’ve listened to James talk about this for years, so it doesn’t faze me, but Finn clicks off his seat belt and scoots up between us. “Say what now?”
“I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think it’s possible, and Dr. Feinberg agrees. When I finish those formulas, I’ll prove it.” James’s fingers tighten around the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white. His passion has always been one of the things I love most about him, but it worries me, too. I’ve learned a lot about James these last two days, and I see more than ever now how he’s like forged metal, strong but brittle, unable to bend.
“What happens when you prove it?” Finn asks.
“We fix the world.”
Only four little words, ones I’ve heard from James a thousand times before, but for some reason they unsettle me to my core this time.
“What do you mean?” Finn asks.
“Imagine what we could change,” James says, “if we could use time. The wars that could be averted, the natural disasters that could be planned for. We could erase so many terrible, senseless things.”
“Wouldn’t that be dangerous?” Finn says. “You don’t know what you could accidentally change. You could, like, kill your grandfather and then you’d never have been born, right?”
James smiles dryly. “Time isn’t quite that simple. For one thing, it isn’t linear, the way we perceive it. And the current research suggests there’s some unknown variable that eliminates threats to time, like the paradox you’re talking about. My theory is that time has a sentient element. It fixes events in place to stop paradoxes from happening. So, in theory, if I were to go back in time to kill my grandfather, that event would become fixed by my action. Because he’s dead, I would never be born, but a remnant of me from my original time, a kind of shadow, would always be there to kill my grandfather and ensure he stayed dead.”
Finn blinks. “I didn’t remotely understand that.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Could you use smaller words?”
“Those were my small words.”
“It still sounds dangerous to me,” Finn says. “So much could go wrong.”
“There are risks,” James concedes, “but progress is always dangerous, isn’t it? Most of the time, walls don’t get dismantled brick by brick. Someone has to crash through them.”
Someone has to crash through them. A pall descends over the car. It sounds so foreboding.
Finn raps his knuckles against the back of James’s skull. “Then I guess it’s a good thing you’ve got such a hard head.”
I roll my eyes. Trust Finn to lighten the mood.
“Ow!” James says, but he’s smiling. He swats at Finn blindly. “You’re lucky I’m driving.”
“I’m not,” I say. It’s so good to see James smile that I want to prolong the moment. I go to knock Finn on the head, but he dodges deeper into the recesses of the backseat.
“Stay away, woman!”
Spurred on by James’s laughter, I unbuckle my seat belt and try again. Finn catches my fist midswing, and I pull back, but he doesn’t let go.
“Hey!” I kneel in my seat for better leverage and pull, but his hand is tight around my wrist now. “Let go!”
“No, you’ll hit me!”
“How old are you two?” James says.
Finn yanks my hand, and I tumble into the backseat with a shriek. Despite my squirming, he manages to catch me in a headlock and muss my hair. I elbow him in the stomach, and I hear James laugh again over the sound of Finn’s grunt.
“You want a piece of this?” Finn says. “You think you can take me, Marchetti?”
Distantly, I hear the sound of James’s cell phone ringing, but now I’m too focused on trying to pry Finn’s fingers off my wrist. I bend his pinkie back until he yelps and lets go, and then I throw myself at him. It seems only fair that I get to mess up his hair, too, but he’s too strong and keeps wrestling me away. I accidentally jam my elbow into his ribs and am shocked when he lets out a girlish, shrieking giggle.
“Oh my God,” I say, breathless, “you’re ticklish?”
He points a finger at me, suddenly very serious. “You stay away from me.”
I grin and launch myself at him, and the two of us are engaged in such an intense battle that I barely notice the car slowing at first. When I do, I glance at James in the rearview mirror and see that his face has gone ash gray.
“James?” I say. Finn tries to tickle me under the arms, and I slap him away. “Stop it. James?”
The car continues to slow, and James steers it to the shoulder of the highway. I scoot forward, and Finn sits up.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
James puts the car into park with one hand and holds the phone to his ear with the other. “I’m here.”
I can hear the person on the other end of the line, a tinny little sound stretched thin by hundreds of miles of air, but I can’t distinguish any words. Instead, I watch James’s face. His expression is an open book to me, because I took the time to learn the language many years ago. What I see makes my throat go dry. I clamber back into the front seat, Finn forgotten.
“Yeah . . .” James says. “Okay . . .”
My hands start to tingle, like they do whenever I get really scared. James once told me it’s because my blood vessels are constricting, sending all the blood to the core of my body in case I have to run or fight. I clench my hands into fists to try to get the feeling back.
The cell phone slips out of James’s grasp and clatters to the floor of the car. He doesn’t move, doesn’t grab for it or even seem to notice it’s gone. His hand hovers, empty, by his ear.
“James,” I whisper.
He turns to look at me, slowly, his face unchanging. His eyes are wide, mouth open, frozen.
Then, like a dam breaking, he crumbles into sobs.
Twenty
Em
Finn and I follow at a distance, far back enough that when James’s BMW shifts onto the shoulder and stops, we have time t
o stop, too. Finn flicks off our headlights, and hopefully we’re far enough behind them that they won’t notice us.
“Do you think they have a flat?” I say when the other car doesn’t move for several minutes.
One of the BMW’s doors open, and the younger Finn climbs out.
“Damn, I’m good-looking,” Finn says, and I smack him.
The driver’s door opens next, and James steps out. His shoulders are bent inward, and he keeps one hand braced against the car for support.
The smile dies on my lips. “It’s happened.”
“What?” Finn squints at them. “It’s not supposed to happen for four more days.”
“Something’s changed.”
Finn bends his head. “Poor James. Poor this James.”
I’m not sure what to say. The James in front of us is just a boy. He doesn’t deserve this.
But I also can’t forget that this is one of the moments that sets the future as I know it into motion.
The two boys switch places, James moving into the backseat of the BMW, where he’s quickly joined by Marina, and Finn slipping behind the wheel.
“Shit,” my Finn says, shifting our car out of park. “He doesn’t know how to drive.”
The BMW jerks forward and starts to pick up speed along the shoulder. It finds a gap in the traffic on the highway and veers sharply into it. Finn winces and follows. The BMW stays in the right lane, doing ten miles under the speed limit, which sends the cars behind it flying into the left lane to pass. Its right blinker is still on, a pulsing beacon in the dark. It pulls off at the next exit and into the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. The younger Finn parks twenty feet away from the nearest car.
“Good call, kid,” Finn mumbles. The BMW is straddling two spaces.
We watch from the far end of the lot as Marina helps James out of the car and into the hotel. Finn fetches a couple of bags from the trunk and follows them inside. Then there’s nothing, only darkness and silence.
“Nate was a good man,” Finn finally says.
“The best.” I close my eyes and picture Nate the night before the fund-raiser, waiting in the cold at his car to see that I got inside all right. Smiling and raising his hand when I waved at him from my open door.
“You okay?” Finn asks.
“Sure,” I say. “I mean, nothing’s really changed. He’s been dead to me for four years.”
“I know, but . . .” Finn takes my hand and brings it to his mouth, kissing my knuckles.
My heart goes hot and seems to melt, spreading warmth through my whole body. How long have I loved Finn? It crept up on me so gradually, I don’t know if I can even pin the moment down. Was it the day in the cells when, after a particularly brutal interrogation, he managed to make me laugh by telling me about the time his father had to call the fire department when he got his head stuck in a storm drain? Or when we were still on the run and I woke up in the back of the cereal truck that was smuggling us across the state line to find his sweatshirt tucked around me while he sat shivering in his T-shirt?
Or had it started even before, back when I was still Marina and thought I couldn’t stand him?
Finn jerks his head toward the entrance of the Holiday Inn, and I turn to look. Speak of the devils. Finn and Marina are walking out together.
“Where are they going?” I say.
They’re headed straight for us. Finn and I duck down behind the dash. I don’t know what exactly will happen if my younger self and I ever come face-to-face, but James was always insistent that the fabric of time was too delicate to survive the paradox it would create.
Their shadows pass over our heads, and we hear Finn speaking, but neither takes any notice of the battered blue Honda. They pass us, and we gradually sit up and watch them walk across the street and into a Denny’s.
“They’ll be gone ten minutes,” Finn says. “At least.”
I nod, suddenly queasy. “It’s our best chance.”
“I’ll do it.” Finn pops open the glove compartment and grabs the gun. “He’s going to be devastated, and I don’t want you to have to see it.”
I touch his cheek. “You’re a pretty sweet guy, Finn Abbott, you know that?”
“I may have heard it once or twice.”
I swallow down the hot ball in my throat. “But I can’t let you do this alone. We’re a team.”
“Em—”
“No way. Besides . . .” I breathe in and take the gun away from him. “I feel like I owe it to him, in some weird way. It should be me.”
With our younger selves safe inside the Denny’s, Finn and I walk into the hotel. I feel about a million years older than the pair who walked out of here, but I hope we won’t look it to an overworked desk attendant in the middle of the night.
“Hi,” Finn says, flashing his most charming smile at the woman behind the desk. “Sorry, I’m a moron. We checked in a few minutes ago?”
The woman nods. “Sure.”
“Our friend is back in the room,” he says. “He’s got a bad cold, so we went out to get him some medicine. I’m hoping he’s fallen asleep by now, the poor guy.”
“Oh, bless his heart,” she says. It’s been years, but I still marvel at Finn’s ability to win people over so quickly.
“Yeah. So, I was wondering if you could make us another copy of our room key?” he says. “We forgot ours, and we don’t want to have to wake him up to get back inside.”
“No problem,” the attendant says, already punching something into a computer. She slips a key into an envelope and scrawls 126 across the front, so we won’t even have to pretend to have forgotten which room we’re in. “Here you go. I hope he feels better.”
“Thanks so much.” Finn takes the key. “You have a nice night.”
“You too.”
“Well, that was easy,” I whisper as we follow the little signs with arrows that lead toward room 126.
“No, that was very dangerous and daring, and it was only through my extreme charm that we pulled it off.”
Even at this moment, he can make me smile. “My mistake.”
Soon we stand in front of the door to 126. It’s on the first floor at the back of the hotel, practically in the corner, which is good. If something goes wrong, we’ll have a better chance of getting away. But hopefully everything will go right, and escape won’t be a concern.
Because we won’t exist anymore.
“Ready?” I say, more to myself than Finn.
I raise the key to the door, but before I can put it in the lock, Finn slides his hand around my neck and pulls me against him, muffling my squawk of surprise with his lips. He kisses me like I’ve never been kissed before. Kiss is too small a word for it. It’s like he’s pouring every ounce of love and lust and regret, every moment of pent-up longing from months in a cell, into me. I press up into him, and when he pulls away to rest his forehead against mine, I’m dazed and out of breath.
“Now,” he whispers, the words ghosting over my lips, “I’m ready.”
I palm his cheek and nod, trying to memorize the color of his eyes in these last few seconds. I was wrong before. They’re not just blue. In the center, right around his pupil, is a tiny ring of greenish yellow you can only see this close, like a secret. I have to remember that.
He nods, and I let my hand drop from his face so I can reach for the gun in my belt.
Twenty-One
Marina
Finn and I slide into a booth to wait for the cheeseburgers we ordered to go. I said we should have a pizza delivered to the room, but James needed a minute alone to call Vivianne. I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened at the hospital, so we left him sitting on the bed, pillow held against his chest, staring at his phone.
“His whole life is going to be different now,” I say. “What’s he going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s all alone.”
“He’s got Viv, and you. He’ll always have you.”
There’s an edge to his v
oice, and it turns my thoughts dark. Not if I’m in New York, he won’t. I haven’t turned my phone back on, and once Mom and Dad realize I’m not coming home, they should leave without me, him to Rome and her to New York. But I can’t put moving off forever if my mother’s determined to do it, and just thinking about it makes me feel like the foundations that hold me together are cracking.
“He has you, too,” I say.
“Yeah, but it’s not the same.”
“What do you mean?”
He shifts in his seat. “Nothing.”
I grab the bowl of sugar packets and begin sorting them: blue, pink, white. Blue, pink, white. “I was always jealous of James, you know. He only had Nate, but Nate really loved him. You know he missed his first session as a congressman to go to James’s science fair? He was always there for him.”
Finn pulls the sugar bowl from my hands and slides it away. “Your parents are assholes. You don’t deserve them, and they definitely don’t deserve you.”
I stare at him, shaken. “I-I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about James.”
“I know.” He looks down at the sticky Formica tabletop. “Just thought it needed saying.”
I don’t know how to respond. It’s like he reached deep inside of me and pulled my darkest and most fearful thoughts out of the muck and into the sunlight for everyone to see.
In a Denny’s.
Em
I pull the gun from my belt and check the safety. When I’m ready, I slip the key card into the lock. It beeps softly, and Finn pushes open the door. I step in first, gun extended, and he follows me. Together we creep inside, and I hear Finn slide the chain across the door after us. We steal past the bathroom, the closet, and refrigerator. With one last breath, I turn the corner into the main area of the room.
It’s empty.
A door opens behind us. We spin around, and I instinctively hide the gun behind my back.
“Hey, guys,” James says as he comes out of the bathroom. “Where’s the food?”
He doesn’t know we’re not them. Either grief or his natural inattention to people has blinded him to the changes time has carved into us. The scars on Finn’s face, the hollowness of my cheeks.